About Athena

(The Virtual Elevator Pitch)

I'm a User Experience Design Specialist who embraces life-long learning in usability, and design thinking processes.

The combination of my extensive software experience with my strong visual design background gives me the ability to transform complex requirements into simple solutions.

What I Do & How I Do It

As a UX Design Specialist for 8+ years,
I welcome the opportunity to share my skills and knowledge with your team.

DESIGN PROCESS

Gather ideas. Brainstorm. Rough sketches. This is just the beginning...

And then

The who, why and where have to be understood before the "pen to paper".

BEYOND...

Great UX design is a personal ongoing process. The goal of great design solutions is what drives me.

Imagery

Adding a UX component right from the beginning
adds value to your products without that big redesign later on.

Wireframe

App Development

More

ATI

Catalyst Control Center for Linux

Concept to Storyboard

This image shows the progression of the Display Control function for the Catalyst Control System on the Linux platform.

Due to time constraints I had to jump to the storyboard stage to help the stakeholders visualize what the final product would closely resemble.

ATI Anisotropic Filtering

"Real-time" Application

3D Filtering

I created this UI to showcase how the user can access the features of a 3D filter developed by the engineering team at AMD/ATI.

Ideally, Anisotropic Filtering would be selected and adjusted in real-time. Due to possible memory constraints and the need to immediately see the effect- I recreated the exact results using a slider function and static imagery. The treatment of the UI elements are meant to align aesthetically with the gaming environment.

Marketwired

RESONATE Feature

Resonate Summary Page

"Resonate" is an application to create news releases. The client can either work with an editor to create a public news release at a specific timeframe or use the Resonate application themselves.

The application works on a numerous progression of steps and depending on what type of news release the user wishes to submit the number of possible features could get rather large. What this page provides is a checklist or in better terms a summary allowing the user is able to verify all the information before hitting the "Submit" button.

PERSONAS

"We The People"

Who Are We Designing For?

The reason of creating personas is to understand who you're designing the product for. Finding out as much as you can about the target group(s) or person(s) and what their journey is and what they want to accomplish by using your product is the vital first step towards a successful project.

These personas provide a good picture (pun intended) of 2 of many. Instead of having this information tucked away in a file in some database, a wall of fame for the entire team to see as they come in everyday reminds us to stay on track and gives validity to what we want to achieve.

CIBC

Website Sample

The Mortgage Center

This image shows the front page from "The Mortgage Center project".

The purpose of this site was to provide users with tools to calculate their mortgage and to find information as to how to obtain a mortgage and connect with mortgage specialists.

CIBC

Descriptive Wireframe

Mortgage Center Section Breakdown

Ideally, the development team is just down the hall from your desk. But more often, the dev team is offsite and in a different timezone.

In order to make sure the signed off design is going to function and look the way it's supposed to look it's vital that every small detail and aspect of the design is communicated. You could provide that "working" prototype but a secondary level of information should be provided be used as a checklist.

MOBILE

Client Management

"Everything at a Glance"

The function of this mobile application is to provide the salesperson who is often on the road with the ability to see at-a-glance information regarding their accounts.

This app also provides a range-history on the levels of activities, tickets, alerts and emails received within a date range.

Marketwired

The Redesign

Operations Desk Re-vamp

One of the issues that was brought to my attention was the inefficiency of the existing products the editorial team currently was using in order to create news releases.

First thing was to understand and identify the product deficiencies by talking to the users then with all the data gathered, work with the team to come up with a new approach. One of the major concerns was changing the product entirely but to ensure that productivity wouldn't be lost should a re-learn be necessary, one of my goals was to retain the features yet redesign the product so that features that are used often would be easier to access.

SOME VISUALS

Application Imagery

Component visuals

I created these visuals using Adobe Illustrator.

This montage shows some image samples I created while at ATM (ATI). The intent of these images was to act as visual prompts for the user during their selection and manipulation of the Catalyst Control Center features. It was important to illustrate these components as accurately as possible. Following the heuristic of having a match between the System and the Real World is one of the usability guidelines key for a usable user interface.

Managing Tool

Sales Tool

Customer Management System

One of the challenges sales people encounter is getting updates on all their accounts and immediate feedback or messages from their team.

This application provides the sales person with many accounts to see at a glance the status, updates, and the ability to make a remark for the team to see.